Zoho Books is an accounting solution that is designed to help small businesses manage their finances. This solution includes dashboards and a wide variety of reports. Business users can automate tasks and set up custom workflows.
The vendor offers a 14 day free trial.
$0
For businesses with turnover <50K USD per annum
Zoho One
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Zoho One is a suite product from Zoho Corporation, that combines their sales and marketing application, and also gives organizations a comprehensive set of tools to organize finances, track payables, and manage bills and expenses.
$45
per month per employee
Pricing
Zoho Books
Zoho One
Editions & Modules
Free
$0
For businesses with turnover <50K USD per annum
Standard
$15
Per Organization/Month, Billed Annually
Professional
$40
Per Organization/Month, Billed Annually
Premium
$60
Per Organization/Month, Billed Annually
All Employee Pricing
$444
per year per employee (Must purchase license for ALL employees)
Flexible User Pricing
$1080
per year Licenses for any no. of users
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Zoho Books
Zoho One
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
$15 Per Organization/Month, Billed Annually
No setup fee
Additional Details
Zoho Books is available for both monthly and yearly plans. Users who sign up for the annual plan get a discount.
If using other cloud applications and you wish to create Zoho Books transactions via APIs, Zoho Books is great. The overall UI and flow of the application are great. If you need a detailed job cost accounting solution and robust reporting there is some room for improvement here.
Zoho Books invoicing and receipting features are second to none. We find it easy to quickly invoice clients and add items to their bills and also for our own receipting internally.
The accounting features are great for our accounting team to be able to see where we are financially and how the business is doing.
The ability to add contacts and run a mini CRM channel with clients within Zoho is invaluable. Since we use this in conjunction with our other CRM channels, it helps to have a centralized place to follow up and see through a sales funnel.
Zoho Books allows us to take payments from clients around the globe a feature we didn't have when we used another accounting system.
The pricing for Zoho Books is fairly reasonable for an SME organization which is a great for us as it pays itself back many times over every month.
Zoho Books is only available in Texas and California. There is no integration allowed for paying employee expenses. The absolute worst aspect is the fact that if you make even the slightest error in data input there is no backing up. You cannot undo an error.
The system does not allow change once implemented, so you must get every one of your beginning balances perfect. The practice of Journal Entries is cumbersome. When reconciling, Zoho Books has adopted a number of required steps that significantly overcomplicate reconciliation using practices that are not consistent with general accounting principles in the US.
On the customer side, you must look in two places to see the beginning balance and the current receivables that might exist for current invoicing.
The way the system works, you must avoid having much trust with the balances depicted. So far, it appears that Zoho Books uses what we called in school "that new math."
It would be terrifying to rely on this bookkeeping system to support an IRS Audit. The system violates too many fundamental accounting principles.
The software is used by so few people that there is concern that we might never find a skilled bookkeeper.
The integration is loose and needs to be more stable and a true integration
Development appears to take long periods of time to bring customer enhancements into the next release. I have seen numerous obvious business application needs to be brought to the attention that is still 2-3 years old without an update
Unified User Interface and back end functionality/configuration across applications
Customization is the biggest struggle for us and most of the time we need to involve a tech person. The chat support is a great feature and very helpful. It would be great to be able to customize and create invoices and correspondence (templates) such are reminders in multiple languages within one organization. The currency (USD) would be the same. We have clients in different countries that don't speak English but pay in USD.
While the software is easy to use and pick up, the different user interfaces and limits across the application make it difficult and slow to implement additional applications quickly and seamlessly across the organization. If the User interface was more consistent we would be able to pick up and train on new apps more efficiently
The support team feels very disjointed. We have filtered through a number of "lead" contacts and are frequently spammed by other Zoho members. Once getting an appropriate support contact on the phone - the team is very helpful, it just takes a lot of hoop jumping to get there. We actually unsubscribed from their support package as we were not getting the value we were looking for.
Support is great as a customer, as a partner I get moved to that team more often and find issues in the support being provided. It also appears that the support agents do not take into account all the information provided and default back to the "step 1 of the playbook" instead of taking into account the business reason the support is being requested and understanding the steps already taken.
We had a lot of problems with Exact Online, support-wise and price-wise. So Zoho Books wins on every point there. While Exact offers way more options, it tends to be really slow... and complex. Again Zoho Books wins. If you want an easy-to-use tool and not pay a lot of money, or if you are a small administration office with a few clients, this tool will be perfect for you.
5 years ago, we decided to use Odoo. At that time, the enterprise version of Odoo was not competitive enough for a small company with minor integration needs when it comes to the pricing per user. Nowadays, pricing is almost equal. The effort of integration processes with Odoo is still higher even though it delivers more potential. A decision between both today would be more difficult for us.
Integration: Zoho Books offers out of the box integrations to extend the functionality and connect with the applications you love like MailChimp, Microsoft Outlook, PandaDoc, and Quickbooks, etc.
Flexibility makes Zoho Books great!
Since I can use forecast reports, I can create customizable sales forecast data from the dashboard to accurately measure revenue forecasts and establish sales quotas.
